From noze Sent Wed, Jun 9th 1999, 15:35
From noze Sent Wed, Jun 9th 1999, 15:35
Wow. I picked up this cd yesterday and it's truly amazing. A great mix
of styles and some great electronic momments on there. At times I
thought I was listening to a Mu-Ziq record. Get one! Don't believe me?
Ok, read a "professional" review...
CIBO MATTO
Stereotype A
(Warner Bros.)
Rock'n'roll has always been about mushing together different musical
influences - in the beginning it was about mixing gospel and blues with
maybe a little country thrown in to forge a new, dirty, iconoclastic
sound,
and from there the mutt-like qualities of rock got even muttier. In the
'90s, you may find five different styles of music making their way
through a
single pop song; the more of a pastiche, the better, it seems ("Look Ma!
I'm
so diverse!"). But few artists can mix together the sounds of, say,
Caetano
Veloso and Black Sabbath without sounding utterly retarded.
Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto are probably amongst the very
few
musicians who have successfully melded Brazilian with metal, but that's
just
the skin on this chicken. They also work in some jazz, no wave,
electronica,
funk, hip-hop, alt rock, and Sean Lennon. And they do it beautifully -
the
end result of their dizzying mix is an awe-inspiring sculpture of found
pieces. To run with this sculpture metaphor for a minute (that's right,
we've moved on from the chicken metaphor) - while other artists might
throw
together a toilet bowl, a tin can, and an empty pasta box and get, well,
a
toilet bowl, tin can, and pasta box lying next to each other, Honda and
Hatori can start with these parts and come out with something resembling
the
statue of David.
Anyhow, when we last saw them, the ladies of Cibo Matto were singing and
rapping about white pepper ice cream, beef jerky, and how to make a
better
birthday cake using lots of oil and MSG. This gastronomic subject matter
was
all mixed up with some seriously groovalicious beats, making their debut
album Viva! La Woman one of the best if not more bizarre records of 1996.
Time magazine even selected Viva! as one of the top 10 all-time hip-hop
albums.
Stereotype A is arguably an even better record. Produced by Yuka Honda,
this
album is so ambitious and so seamless; the lyrics, while focused less
exclusively on poultry and sweetmeats, are still deliciously eccentric
(in
"Sci-Fi Wasabi," Hatori rhymes "Obi Wan Kenobi" with "Told me in the
lobby"
in her accented English; and lines in the vein of "We know we are not
apes/But we could make sweet seedless grapes" from the track "Working for
Vacation" abound); and there are solid melodies all over the place.
Highlights: the whole album, basically. "Working for Vacation" starts us
off
with some freaky double tempo structure and a quirky, highly singable
chorus; "Spoon," which was a great cut on Cibo's 1997 EP Super Relax, is
remixed here, filled-in and funked- up; "Blue Train," with its fuzzed-out
stompin' guitars, begs the question, "where's Ozzy?"; and "Sunday," one
of
two songs on the album co-written by Honda's boyfriend Sean Lennon, is a
real epic, starting out with an upbeat rap thing going on, then winding
down
into a downtempo second "movement," evoking the feeling of a sweet Sunday
afternoon with friends that all too soon devolves into disappointment as
the
prospect of Monday looms.
Lowlights: none. I'm putting this sucker on my "Best of 1999" list, no
doubt.
---Jennifer Schonborn
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